2014 Congressional

"Democrats hoping improvements in the economy's course and the Affordable Care Act's implementation would level the playing field for the fall elections should brace themselves," USA Today's Susan Page and Kendall Breitman warned the president's party in their May 5 front-page story, "Poll shows biggest advantage for Republicans in 2 decades." So naturally the Big Three broadcast networks…

ABC’s This Week hosted Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) For his first Sunday show interview and used the opportunity to promote his 2014 reelection for Senate yet provided no critics for his reelection bid.  Being interviewed by ABC’s Jeff Zeleny, Franken was hyped as having “the most famous laugh in politics. But these days, Al Franken is delivering a different kind of punch line.” [See video…

The liberal media all too often confuses temperamentally "low-key" red-state Democrats for moderates when their voting record is anything but.  The latest example comes today in Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold's 40-paragraph front-page profile for Sen. Mark Pryor, who is facing a tight reelection battle against the "sharply conservative" Tom Cotton. Pryor's "personality matches his…

On Friday, NBC's Today kicked off its 2014 midterm election coverage by doing a fawning puff piece on former American Idol contestant Clay Aiken running for Congress in North Carolina as a Democrat. Co-host Willie Geist proclaimed: "A race that's getting a lot of attention. Clay Aiken is used to being at the mercy of the voters. He came in second on American Idol in 2003 and now he's running…

Last weekend in Indianapolis, a reported 80,000 people attended the 143rd NRA Annual Meeting. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's group Everytown For Gun Safety was also present — but barely. Media coverage of that group's activities largely tiptoed around the tiny number of people, some allegedly paid, the group was able to gather. Let's start with a Sunday morning report from NPR's…

Appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday April 30, Chuck Todd tried to spin the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows half of Americans disapprove of Obama as “Improvement” for the Democrat. Despite Todd’s desperate attempts to put a rosy picture on Obama’s flailing poll numbers, his analysis differs greatly from the pundits at The Wall Street Journal. James Freeman,…

On the Monday, April 28, PoliticsNation on MSNBC, during a discussion of the arrest of New York Republican Rep. Michael Grimm, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank played up the possibility that this scandal and others involving GOP congressmen could hurt Republican candidates in other parts of the country. Milbank:

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes, a reliable defender of President Obama, placed the blame on the cynical GOP for depriving poor West Virginians of health care for electoral advantage, in Sunday's "Political Stigma Is Depressing Participation in Health Law." The text box read: "Misconceptions are common as attack ads fill airwaves in West Virginia." Calmes pitted a cynical, misleading,…

On the Wednesday, April 23, PoliticsNation on MSNBC, Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart asserted that Republican doubts about global warming would be "one more thing that is going to hasten the demise, the end of the Republican Party" as he reacted to a clip of several North Carolina Republican Senate candidates expressing doubts when asked if "climate change" is a "fact." And, as she…

MSNBC's Ari Melber seemed downright gleeful at the news that vulnerable Senate Democrats have started running campaign ads touting their support for ObamaCare. Filling in for host Lawrence O'Donnell on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell on Monday April 21, Melber hyped how "there are signs that President Obama's new call to run on the Affordable Care Act has gotten through to Democrats."…

Well, that was fast. When your humble correspondent first read the New York Times/Kaiser Family Foundation poll this morning showing incumbent Mark Pryor suddenly surging into a ten point lead over challenger Tom Cotton in the Arkansas Senate race, my suspicious antenna immediately sensed something was wrong with the way the poll was conducted. However, I figured the Times wouldn't be so…

Apart from gutting America's military, our standing in the world, our fiscal stability, the economy, the office of the presidency, conventional energy sources, the free market and religious liberty, Obama has little to boast about other than Obamacare, so let him go for it. Yes, let him gloat, because the more he bloviates in defense of the indefensible — the more he spins the unspinnable —…

Last Tuesday, in an incredibly childish piece, even by his non-standards, Politico's David Nather acted as if the resistance at Clive Bundy's ranch was endorsed and supported entirely by the tea party movement and/or Republicans and/or conservatives, so he could then characterize their post stand-off behavior — i.e., pursuit of their longer-term political goals — as some form of abandonment.…

Appearing as a panel member on the Sunday, April 20, Disrupt with Karen Finney, MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Alter -- formerly of Newsweek -- asserted that President Obama's move to delay a final decision on the Keystone Pipeline "strongly increases the likelihood that he will rule against the pipeline after the election." He recounted a history of Democratic presidents appeasing liberal…